FoliovisionMaking the web work for you2015-08-01T07:11:50Zhttps://foliovision.com/feed/atomWordPressAlechttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=96532015-08-01T07:11:50Z2015-08-01T00:29:29Z
The ideal film is both entertaining and enlightening and visually special. Netflix doesn't offer too many of these and those that they do offer are pretty worn out.]]>

Netflix only offers between 2000 and 6000 films available per market at any one time, but internationally there are about 14,000 feature films available. A good DNS redirection service gives you access to all 14,000 films. The difference between a VPN and DNS redirection service is that the VPN takes over your whole network, sending all data via the remote location. DNS redirection services send only the DNS data via the remote location, leading to much faster file transfers (in theory).

Netflix usually won't let people see award winning films in their home markets (although it's weird, sometimes a film which has been overexposed in the Netherlands shows up there but is not available in Canada). Canada has much higher brow fare than US Netflix (independent films, foreign films) but less blockbusters.

In general, I'm not sure I'd recommend Netflix at all to the true film lover as Netflix offers two categories of films.

Entertaining films which don't have much value.

Enlightening films which don't offer much entertainment.

The ideal film is both entertaining and enlightening and visually special. Netflix doesn't offer too many of these and those that they do offer are usually pretty much worn out (Oscar Winners everyone has seen five times).

But your chances of finding these films goes way up if you have access to the full library as the best films are usually only in three to ten markets.

The DNS redirection service which impressed me the most is Unotelly. Their tools to show you how your redirection is working or not working are second to none. On top of that Unotelly offer all kinds of alternative redirection for specific devices (say Sony or Samsung) in specific locations. Unotelly was also good about adding services (like independent film sites).

For half a year before I found Unotelly I was using Unblock-US. In theory, the difference should be minor between the two services. Just Unotelly supports many more platforms and seems a bit nicer.

Both Unotelly and Unblock-US offer good documentation, including how to get around the latest tricks to hardwire DNS via Google's DNS servers (Sony and Samsung) via router level rerouting.

Tonight I was cleaning out my spam folder though and I noticed the biggest difference between Unotelly and Unblock-US. It appears Unblock-US has been selling my email address to dating services (I use service specific email addresses).

unblock us sells your address to date sites 1

unblock us sells your address to date sites 2

Frankly I just wouldn't trust a service who sells my address to spammers. No spam has come in on my Unotelly specific email addresses.

On top of the good work with the DNS redirection services, Unotelly has just launched what threatens to be the most useful international Netflix search service (up until now it's been the lovely although finicky MoreFlicks.com which tries to include iTunes, BBC and who knows what else). Filmefy.com is the name of the new search service and it categorises films by genre but includes all Netflix films around the world.

Filmefy's special feature is shared playlists, allowing you to browse the playlists other people have made. Straight from the music sharing systems, human curated lists is a great way to get a lot of interesting films in one place.

What could improve Filmefy is if one could choose genre and country of origin. Or genre, country of origin and production year. This kind of granularity would help the viewer get out of the Netflix rut of the same old, same old (Netflix really buries the more obscure films). Hopefully these improvements will come soon.

]]>0Alechttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=96132015-07-29T12:15:10Z2015-07-28T23:02:22Z
When you rip Dropbox out, one must be careful to undo the special setups you might have put in along the way.]]>

We've been slowly removing American cloud services from Foliovision, as the extent of American duplicity about privacy and industrial espionage becomes apparent. One of the services with which it was relatively difficult to part was Dropbox.

Regardless, with international state terrorist and Bush security czarina Condoleeza Rice on the Board of Directors, Dropbox had to go. To the Dropbox founders credit, the requirement to openly appoint Condoleeze Rice on the Board of Directors suggests someone felt that founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi needed very close supervision. I would love to have been inside those meetings, before and after. "Remain professional everyone. We all have a job to do."

What was great about Dropbox is how it integrates tightly with applications like 1password and Typinator which need daily trimming. I've moved back to moving around with a thumbdrive. It is more of a nuisance as one must quit all applications to be able to pull the drive.

On the other hand, Dropbox over the last two years has become very CPU greedy, often spending hours using a whole processor or two on indexing. By removing Dropbox my computers have all become much more powerful. You feel the difference more on a Macbook 11" or an old 17" Core2Duo than a quad processor Mac but on those dual processor Macs it's the difference between sluggish and spritely.

When you rip Dropbox out, one must be careful to undo the special setups you might have put in along the way. For the last two months I've had regular BBEdit crashes, with all recent versions.

8.7.2 launches and runs for about ten or twenty minutes before crashing.

9.6.3 crashes on launch.

10.5.13 crashes on launch

Strangely TextWrangler ran just fine so I used it as a crutch in the meantime. Still I wanted my BBEdit back for the nice HTML tools, HTMLpreview and occasional grep searches on folders.

Removing BBEdit preferences didn't help. Removing BBEdit licensing didn't help. Non-stop crashes on launch. Checking out BBEdit's list of conflicting software didn't help (it turns out I've dumped all my Contextual Menu extensions already). I'm not the only one to be made nervous by Default Folder. Until version 4.4.4 Default Folder could force crash BBEdit. But it wasn't a software conflict. It was much simpler.

It turns out I'd put a alias from the ~/Application Support/BBEdit to my Dropbox. What was great about this is that I'd see all my recent files when reopening BBEdit on one of my four or five work computers (yes, I really do wander from working on one computer to another, I'm thinking of cutting back both computers and hours on the computer).

very necessary BBEdit Application Support folder

With the broken alias in place, BBEdit was unable to replace those Application Support files and crashing (harder in more recent versions). Once I removed the alias, everything went back to normal.

Moral of the story: the less you customize and hotrod your computer and OS, the less trouble you will have with said computer.

]]>2Alechttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=95242015-07-01T12:09:24Z2015-06-29T19:53:45Z
Who are the worst copycat offenders in the Wordpress software sphere? There are two clear winners WPMUdev and iThemes.]]>

We use a lot of software at Foliovision. What we like are stable reliable solutions which deliver what they promise. What we hate is hypeware which overpromises and underdelivers. Often hypeware is delivered by companies which look for successful niches, clone the existing software (easy enough thanks to Matt Mullenweg's and Automattic's insistence that all code must be GPL). Cloned code is generally vastly inferior to the original (most often coded by a passionate coder with a deep understanding of the problem he is trying to solve).

What those copycat coders then do is market the heck out of "their" new product, often making sales where better code is available free or outselling a less expensive and better solution.

WPMUdev

The original idea behind WPMU was not a bad one. Most plugins were coded for single site and therefore there was a huge need for expertise and plugins which would work on multisite networks.

What appeared to happen is that James Farmer wanted to bring every single kind of plugin under his roof, from membership plugins to newsletter plugins to ecommerce to antispam to social plugins to support plugins to ad plugins (to name just a few areas). With over 250 plugins, you can imagine the quality of the plugins.

wpmudev plugin numbers

Even worse than the original code is the support in most cases (the freelance plugin authors are run off their feet, didn't code the plugin well in the first place and have another dozen plugins to support). Apparently there are over 300,000 members (I'm not sure how many are paying and active, let's say 50K). Even with members paying between $100/year (the cheapest membership at 85% discount - if you don't sign up or renew, you'll eventually get this offer) and $500/year (about the most you can pay, although theoretically $600/year is possible), unlimited support on unlimited sites at those rates is simply not sustainable. I understand James Farmer well in this respect. It's why Foliovision charges for advanced support (we answer questions for our pro users free, but if we have to touch your code, it's extra) for our own FV Player Pro.

Basically a WPMUdev plugin is a dead end. But at least they are GPL so you can do what you want to with it. While the big plugins like membership and ecommerce just are not good enough (not best of breed and why would you use anything else), some of the smaller niche plugins can be useful and save your own developers half a day or a day of coding. One can even say for these niche plugins, some support is available which beats the WordPress.org repository in some cases (Mark Jaquith's Subscribe to Comments has been retired and the replacement open source Subscribe to Comments Reloaded is not updated fast enough or bullet proof enough for my taste so we've coded some fixes. I'm deliberately not counting predatory third party services like Jetpack or Postmatic or Disqus - there's no reason for a publisher to have to manage comments or comment subscriptions offsite).*

What WPMUdev does which is unconscionable and why we would never recommend WPMUdev to a WordPress service provider is stick a big fat marketing ad in your client's dashboard. As we do use WPMUdev code sometimes (before they started spamming all our clients), we have written a plugin to stop their marketing materials. If you are stuck using WPMUdev code, I'll attach it to this post for you to download next week and use on your own client sites to suppress their dashboard. We'll add it to the WordPress repository soon.

wpmudev dashboard defacement

As you can see WPMUdev has intruded on your client's site with:

an alert (which is not an alert but social media marketing)

their own dashboard (advertising)

their own dev news (no better or worse than any other WP news source: I'd recommend WP Tavern instead).

Some of the smaller niche plugins can be useful. It's a pity that WPMUdev are so full of themselves that they deface client sites. If you are not a large WP development company, I see little reason to invest even the $100/year (lowest rate) in a membership. At Foliovision's scale (we've built about a thousand sites and manage nearly 100), WPMUdev membership does (just) make sense for us as an extra resource. Our expectations are no longer very high.

iThemes

Corey Miller's iThemes business model is a little bit different. Instead of taking on the WPMU niche with blanket coverage, iThemes approach is to find the most successful WordPress niches and get there with a usable product and a whole lot of marketing. Of course the right answer is great code and great marketing. If one has to choose, I far prefer great coding with adequate or even weak marketing to those selling second rate code. Great coders with both free and pro plugins who rarely release substandard code include Pippin Williamson of Pippin's plugins (Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro), Justin Tadlock (Theme Hybrid), Stefano Lissa (Satollo Essential WordPress Plugins, Newsletter Pro) WP Ninjas (Ninja Forms), Swiftype (WordPress search only) or BraveNewCode (even if WP Touch Pro is more or less obsolete at this point (time to update to a responsive design theme comrades!). This is just a short illustrative list. There are many other dedicated coders working on the WordPress platform on the freemium model who deserve our support.

Here's who iThemes has gone after over the years:

BackupBuddy --> Automatic WordPress Backup 2010 (iThemes claim BackupBuddy was the original WordPress backup plugin, but it's an open lie as Joast's post and the Brad Ulrich's comment proves).

Exchange --> WooCommerce. WooCommerce extensions are so aggressively overpriced, in this case I can't blame iThemes for entering an non-competitive and large market (WP eCommerce is terrible and the other WordPress store alternatives are not up for a large scale fully customisable open source shipping store with multiple payment gateways).

iThemes Security --> Sucuri (actually iThemes bought out a free plugin Better WP Security and made it pro and worse). Sucuri is far less intrusive than iThemes Security and Sucuri support is fabulous in case your site does get into trouble. Good luck with the clowns in iThemes support who are likely to know less about WordPress security than you do.

Sync --> MainWP and ManageWP. Both work far better. ManageWP is a service and is much easier for the beginner to set up, while MainWP is a more affordable option for developers. InfiniteWP is a third good option.

It appears iThemes haven't had an original idea in their lives. Rather foolishly, we've been customers for a long time (for their pro plugin bundle). I believe iThemes were the first to bring to the WordPress community self-destructing plugins.

WordPress plugin authors soon learned that due to constant updates, plugin updates would be a lot of work and would require an ongoing revenue stream. License renewal became common practice for the wiser authors (rather than lifetime upgrades). Normal policy is for a plugin to just stop upgrading itself if the support license is not renewed. iThemes plugins act differently - even essential ones like backup. When your yearly license expires not only can you not install the plugin on new domains, it stops working completely on existing licensed sites. In additional, it posts extremely push notices into your dashboard and the top of your admin screen telling your client s/he is using unlicensed software (which for heaven's sake doesn't even work anymore).

What's worse, BackupBuddy fails on larger sites (even medium sized sites) and sometimes fails invisibly so it's worse than no coverage. The year we rolled out BackupBuddy was a year to regret. Our clients are long term serious publishers with huge archives. BackupBuddy failed more often than it worked. iThemes workaround were risible. We retreated to server level backups.

Most WordPress publishers don't have that option. What does work for backups and is one click install is Automattic's Vaultpress $5/month plan. Many of you know I don't care at all for Jetpack (or even overpriced Akismet) but standalone Vaultpress is a very good and very competitively priced service. Just make sure to choose the simple daily backup (you don't need hourly backup and if you do, you are probably pulling server level hourly backups already). If you don't want to send all your data to Automattic, BackWPup has your back for free (with competent paid support available), allowing you to choose your own backup destination. Here's another perspective on WordPress backup. Looking more closely, the more technical respondents are using Vaultpress or server level backups. There are several complaints about backup plugin (Vaultpress apart) reliability.

Apparently after the BackupBuddy fiasco, we hadn't learned our lesson yet, as we fell for iThemes siren song marketing for Sync. We'd been managing our hundred odd WordPress sites via our own tools. With the never ending updates we were gradually struggling to keep up with site administration. I believe we'd looked at ManageWP but the yearly fees (ManageWP pushes you into a two year contract to get decent rates) were pretty stiff (over $2000 for two years). iThemes Sync was just $300 at half price with a year's license.

a typical ithemes hard sell offer: hard sell works
at least until you buy

Alas with Sync we were unable to reliably update plugins. Sync has a great uptime service. Except that it sends all emails on first failure on a site by site basis. As most of us have large groups of sites on single services, it just requires a single hiccup to end up with forty emails in your inbox. One of our main hosts reboots their routers everyday in the early morning. Less than a minute downtime and means that the routers don't fail when you need them. It also means forty senseless emails in your inbox everyday.

Intelligent uptime monitoring tools do two things:

they group downtime notifications.

they test the site again after one minute or two minutes before sending a notification.

Intelligent would not be a good word to describe iThemes Sync. iThemes unable to give us a positive resolution of a single support ticket. Everything was impossible or too difficult (decent failure notices for instance).

The positive part of the experience with iThemes Sync is we realised just how useful it would be to have good server independent management tools for our client sites. After iThemes Sync we used ManageWP for a month on a free trial but with all our client sites. We never had a support ticket unresolved. ManageWP is great. There were three issues with ManageWP for us:

third party access to our client sites: some of our clients are not supposed to allow access to their sites by third parties. An out of country solution in Serbia was pushing the line a bit far.

cost: to get reasonable rates ManageWP required two years payment up front (although they say you get all the unused part back if you stop using the service) which as a couple of thousand of dollars in our case.

we didn't need the SEO features but required the white labelling features. Those require doubling! the cost of your subscription (bringing what for us were unneeded SEO features which do indeed cost ManageWP service fees).

Both MainWP and InfiniteWP offer free versions of their plugins which allow you to test them on your server. Both are well rated, although MainWP takes the nod in the most recent reviews. For the pro versions, both MainWP and InfiniteWP offer full bundles of extensions for $399. MainWP takes the edge though as they allow you to buy whatever extensions you want for your account. Here are our essential starter plugins:

Advanced Uptime Monitor Extension

Branding Extension

Clean and Lock Extension

Client Reports Extension

Code Snippets

Sucuri Extension

The total bill was less than $100 for all of this power. We have also avoided the bundle as we don't want all the extensions active on our server (it's hard to avoid activating them all).

While MainWP was sluggish on Apache (lots of web applications are), MainWP has been very fast and easy to use as soon as we upgraded our backup server to paid Litespeed (not expensive for a VPS, about $350 - Litespeed support has never failed us either - a small price to pay for both performance and peace of mind). We'll be back to buy the MainWP backup extensions among others.

Copycat Code Conclusion

So in addition to ethical concerns, there are performance and support reasons to avoid copycat code. If you want both good code and good support, I recommend you go to see a specialist, whether it's for backup, security or site management. Probably the company owner will be a developer him/herself or at the very least, deeply engaged in his/her specialty area.

Particularly offensive about both WPMUdev and iThemes is how they feel that using their code gives their owners the right to hijack your client dashboards. Just on this basis, I would avoid using any of their products on a client website. The only place either of them show real innovation is new ways to hijack your client sites admin areas.

I cannot recommend either of the copycat coders here WPMUdev (though they run a pretty good weblog) or iThemes. I hope some of the alternatives I've suggested help you build and maintain better websites faster.

* While writing this post, I discovered Satollo has merged Comment Image and Comment Notifier into a single paid plugin called Comment Plus at just $9.95. We'll be trying this on our client sites for a more robust solution and not depending on a third party service (paid or not).

]]>7Martinhttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=94952015-07-27T14:00:44Z2015-06-12T12:30:00Z
Flowplayer 6 unfortunately has few critical bugs at this point which delayed our upgrade of FV Flowplayer.]]>

The issues in Flowplayer 6.0.1 were fixed, thanks to Flowplayer team for quick fixes!

Note for Pro users: Make sure you contact us to get access to beta version of FV Player Pro compatible with FV Flowplayer 6 as the old version of FV Player Pro won't work!

FV Player is the most feature rich and easiest to use WordPress video player. The core video engine we use is the excellent Flowplayer. As you may know, Flowplayer.org recently released a full version upgrade - Flowplayer 6. It has some great new features:

HLS support in the Flash engine - making the HLS playback possible in basically every browser.

Subtitles button with multilingual support

Engine switching in playlists - making it possible to mix the video formats.

Better skin and other improvements

During our use it seemed to be faster than version 5

Many publishers are asking us why we continue to use Flowplayer 5 as the core engine for FV Player and have not moved to Flowplayer 6. Unfortunately Flowplayer 6 has a few critical bugs at this point:

Here's a screenshot of FV Flowplayer with version 6 core runnning with our Quality Switching

Web developers beware - Flowplayer 6 won't play on localhost at this point without a valid license key. This bug is getting fixed as well.

For the moment, for pro video publishers are much better off using the very reliable Flowplayer 5 engine.

We continue monitoring the situation and as soon as the two show stopping bugs above get fixed, we will release the Flowplayer 6 version of both FV Flowplayer, FV Player Pro (Vimeo, YouTube, quality switching, video ads) and FV Player VAST (video ad networks).

If your website has a lot of comments and uses a plugin like Subscribe to Comments Reloaded to let users subscribe to new comment notifications, you probably had an issue with your comment notification being marked as spam.

One great way of preventing that is to use SendGrid. With SendGrid, you never deliver unsolicited email again. As soon as the email fails to get delivered or is marked as spam, that email address won't see another email from you again.

keeping these email addresses in your database of subscribers can lead to trouble (sooner or later)

That's why we decided to solve this situation:

Our plugin adds a notice to let you know about the improvement

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Better Unsubscribe

It's out plugin which simplifies the unsubscription from Subscribe to Comments Reloaded comment notifications. Now it also processes the SendGrid bounces!

If you use WP Mail SMTP or Mailer plugins, we detect the SendGrid login and then check for bounces in a WP cron. Bounced emails get unsubscribed from comment notifications.

This is much more simple than using the SendGrid Events API to notify your website about individual bounced email address and it works.

More tips

If you send a lot of comment notifications per each article, the comment posting might be slowed down. Just use the Mailer plugin which mentioned above and it will queue any outgoing emails to not slow down the posting

Google Personally Identifiable Information check doesn't like the Subscribe to Comments Reloaded unsubscription URLs (they contain the user email address). This is getting fixed by the plugin author now. In the meantime you can just exclude your adds if ?sre query attribute is present in page URL.

]]>1Martinhttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=93372015-05-13T08:23:14Z2015-05-13T08:23:14Z
We add a redirection to attachment URLs, remove shortlinks and hAtom microformat data. This article shows you why and how to re-enable it.]]>

This new version took us a while to release. It brings a lot of SEO and functional improvements. Some of the changes affect your site structure, so our upgrade note makes sure you are informed:

Upgrade notice.

SEO Improvements

WordPress attachment URLs are redirected to file URLs - when cleaning up client websites, we often find a lof of URLs like /?attachment_id={attachment_id} or /year/month/post-name/attachment-name and sometimes these URLs over-rank the actual posts. FV Simpler SEO redirects these URLs straight to the actual file.

This option is enabled by default , but you can disable it in Settings -> FV Simpler SEO -> Advanced Options -> Redirect attachment links to the file URLs.

hAtom microformats are removed - this is done by the hentry class on your post DIV element which is added in by WordPress automatically. Yet the markup is broken even if you install a clean new website. Check your site in Google Structure Data Testing Tool and you might find an issue like this:

Broken hAtom on a website with Twenty Twelve and close to no plugins

WordPress shortlink removed - we don't recommend using the WordPress shortlinks as they are bit against the concept of permalinks where the link doesn't change. Shortlinks can change as they are using post ID, so then you loose the link to your blog. Services like Twitter have their own link shortening service anyway.

Editing category SEO titles

Control your XML sitemap - we found that XML Sitemap & Google News feeds is currently the most reliable XML sitemap plugin, but it doesn't support category or author exclusion. Install our plugin and head over to Settings -> FV Simpler SEO -> XML Sitemap & Google News feeds to exclude any category or author!

Import your data from WordPress Seo by Yoast - we import the post SEO title and description, if its not already present. See Settings -> FV Simpler SEO -> Import.

Further reading

]]>0Martinhttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=93162015-05-05T10:22:09Z2015-05-05T10:13:36Z
Show all of your Vimeo videos belonging to a channel on a single page. Add custom video ads to your videos.]]>

Further reading

]]>0Martinhttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=93062015-05-07T07:56:10Z2015-04-30T07:48:55Z
Update for WordPress 4.2.2: The issue is still real. The fix described below still works. The new db_version is 31535. When you upgrade to WordPress 4.2, it will automatically convert the tables to utf8mb4, if the following conditions are met: You’re … More]]>

Update for WordPress 4.2.2: The issue is still real. The fix described below still works. The new db_version is 31535.

When you upgrade to WordPress 4.2, it will automatically convert the tables to utf8mb4, if the following conditions are met:

You’re currently using the utf8 character set.

Your MySQL server is version 5.5.3 or higher (including all 10.x versions of MariaDB).

Your MySQL client libraries are version 5.5.3 or higher. If you’re using mysqlnd, 5.0.9 or higher.

This is to improve the support for all the weird characters in the world. You can read more about it on the Make WordPress Core blog.

This upgrade is done when you try to log in. You may have noticed the following screen while doing so:

Database upgrade for WordPress 4.2

Normally you just click to upgrade and that's it. But on a lot of our websites the operation timed out. So our clients were complaining they can't get to their website.

The thing is PHP is only allowed to work for 30 seconds and that's not enough. Increasing to 60 seconds or even 120 didn't helped. WordPress executes a lot of database queries during this process and it doesn't record which were finished properly. So if it won't finish the operation in 30 seconds, it's as if it never even started.

How to fix this

That's why we came up with this shell script which lets you execute the upgrade from the server command line. The advantage is that command line PHP is not restricted to the 30 seconds run time:

This might take minutes, your database tables will get locked and nobody will be able to use the site properly. So you should schedule this for low traffic hours. Also WordPress shows some information about the process once it's one. In our case we got:

curiously enough, this website managed to do the database upgrades in to 30 seconds limit

Quick fix

If you want to avoid the database upgrade quickly, you can set db_version to 31533 and then revert it back once you are ready to do this. Don't postpone this upgrade until forever as you might get into trouble with later WordPress versions.

]]>3Martinhttp://foliovision.comhttps://foliovision.com/?p=92762015-04-21T13:50:41Z2015-04-21T13:43:33Z
Here is the deal with the WordPress cache plugins: even if you install such plugin, there is a fair amount of users who load your sites without speed benefits of cache. No matter if you use Hyper Cache, WP Super … More]]>

Here is the deal with the WordPress cache plugins: even if you install such plugin, there is a fair amount of users who load your sites without speed benefits of cache. No matter if you use Hyper Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.

WP cache plugins simply skip the cache altogether if the visitor left a comment on the website with his browser by checking for the comment cookie. That's quite ineffective if you have 10K posts on your blog and the user only left a comment on a single article. Now imagine that your blog has a lot of discussion where dozens of users actively participate - you will see your server load going up.

WP cache plugins typically allow you to send cached data to these comment authors, but that means they don't get the "Your comment is awaiting moderation" message, which is unacceptable.

Our work on this started when we discovered that singe post view on one of our busiest websites takes 1500 - 2000 ms on average and that the cause is not high number of SQL queries, but slow PHP execution (even though we do use PHP op cache). We analyzed what takes so much time and it was the wp_list_comments() function. This site gets tens of thousands page views every day and there is an average of 120 comments per article. Some articles have thousands of comments and we don't like to page them. We don't like paging at all.

That's why we added a comment caching solution into FV Thoughtful Comments - our comment front end moderation tool. It stores the comments HTML in a file and serves to that to all visitors who are not logged in and don't have a pending comment under the article.

Simply enable Settings -> FV Thoughtful Comments -> Comment cache. Our solution works with both paged and unpaged comments and support WPTouch Pro for the mobile site. It also works great with any existing WP cache plugin.

Here's where the Comment cache can be enabled

Does it really improve site speed?

We made a lot of claims, so let's support it with some data. Here's the graph of /single transaction time of New Relic for our website:

New Relic /single transaction - no comments cache

Here's the same graph after FV Thoughtful Comments Comment cache was enabled:

Basic Flowplayer version tracks number of seconds played for each users, which then gives you an average value in Google Analytics Events list. However this takes place when you stop the video or leave the page and it's not 100% reliable.

That's why FV Flowplayer now tracks the following events:

Video start

Video first quartile

Video second quartile

Video third quartile

Video complete

So If you have a partner company for which you post propagational video on your website, you can reliably report how many visitors seen the full video now. Which is more important than knowing the average playback time for a video.

See how many users seen your video until the end

If the user skips part of the video he still has to see a part of each quartile to make it track - so just skipping to the end won't count as "Video complete".

This is similar to VAST/VPAID ad playback tracking which also counts the quartiles. We also leave the original Flowplayer Google Analytics stats in, you can still find it under the "Video / Seconds played" event label. Read how to use the stats in our How to use Google Analytics with FV Flowplayer guide.